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Daesh destroyed almost half of an ancient city in Syria

The extremist group dug up undiscovered artifacts at Tal Ajaja, an ancient Assyrian city that flourished 3,000 years ago, and destroyed them, AFP reported.

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When the Islamic State group captured Tal Ajaja, one of Syria's most important Assyrian-era sites, they discovered previously unknown millennia-old statues and cuneiform tablets, and then they destroyed them.

By Ishaan TharoorThe Washington Post

Tues., Aug. 9, 2016

Daesh has looted or destroyed a considerable portion of the Tal Ajaja archeological site in northeastern Syria, according to Agence France-Presse. Khaled Ahmo, director of antiquities in Hasakah province, where the ancient mound is located, told AFP that “more than 40 per cent of Tal Ajaja was destroyed or ravaged” by the extremist group’s fighters.

The militants had overrun the area in 2014, but in recent months they were chased out of whole stretches of Hasakah by a campaign led by Kurdish militias. In the wake of the departure of Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, the extent of the damage the militants have wrought is being steadily discovered.

Tal Ajaja, about 48 kilometres from the border with Iraq, is one of a series of vast Mesopotamian mounds rich in artifacts and relics going back about three or four millennia. In 2014, video emerged of Daesh militants smashing Assyrian statues at the site. According to the extremist group’s apocalyptic creed, representations of deities and sites of pre-Islamic worship are worthy of destruction. As the group’s fighters wreaked havoc on the civilian populations caught up in their onslaught, they also pulverized what they could of the region’s supposedly apostate history.

Moreover, Daesh developed a lucrative, illicit trade in smuggling the antiquities it chose not to smash. This also was the case in Tal Ajaja, where the militants dug tunnels in previously untouched areas of the site and unearthed hitherto unknown treasures — most of which have disappeared.

“They found items that were still buried, statues, columns. We’ve lost many things,” Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of Syria’s antiquities department, told AFP.

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He added: “These barbarians have burnt pages of Mesopotamia’s history. In two or three months, they wiped out what would have required 50 years of archeological excavations.”

The Temple of Baal in Palmyra, Syria, which was almost completely demolished by Daesh, April 2, 2016. (BRYAN DENTON / NYT)

It’s one of the many bitter ironies of the moment that Daesh — an outfit driven by a puritanical zeal and a nihilistic penchant for violence — has taken root in one of the most archaeologically rich parts of the world. The stretches of northern Iraq and Syria where the group has seized territory are home to many layers of history and the ruins of dozens of ancient civilizations, including some of the world’s first urban societies.

The regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has used Daesh’s razing of the past and ransacking of museums as part of its propaganda. After regime forces recaptured Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, with Russian support this year, the government held a concert in the site’s Roman-era amphitheatre.

Russian President Vladimir Putin beamed in via video conference and declared the liberation of Palmyra from Daesh a “sign of hope in the battle against terrorism.”

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